Guitar Player

Guitar Player, painted on canvas in 1873 at the Clark Art Institute, belongs to Boldini's early genre painting period, when he was absorbing the lessons of both the seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish masters and the contemporary Parisian genre painters who depicted everyday life with sympathetic attention. The guitar as a prop in genre painting had a long history connecting to Spanish and Italian tradition — Caravaggio, Vermeer, and later Courbet all used musical instruments as vehicles for exploring the social and sensory world of their periods. Boldini's treatment at this relatively early date — before his full development as a society portraitist — shows him working in a more intimate, exploratory mode. The Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts holds several Boldini works, reflecting American collections' substantial appetite for this kind of late nineteenth-century European genre painting. The 1873 date makes this a near-contemporary of his street scene and genre subjects from the same year, all part of his effort to establish himself in the Parisian art world.

The canvas shows Boldini's early development of his bravura handling: the guitar's wooden surface is rendered with careful tonal modelling, but the figure's clothing and the background are handled more loosely. The warm resonance box of the instrument provides a tonal focus within the composition. Hands on strings or fretboard receive particular attention as the locus of musical action.